Insufficient Memory

In 2018 I found a Sony Mavica in a storage closet at Tulane. It was the first commercially successful digital camera, shooting a third of a megapixel onto a 3.5-inch floppy. I found it the same day I was reading congressional debates that listed the names of queer people murdered in the years that camera came to market. I had never heard a single one of those names. I searched for them and found almost nothing.

I spent eighteen months with the research librarians at Tulane trying to rebuild these lives out of whatever had been digitized. Local news outlets were mostly uninterested and the queer papers were never scanned, so what was left were scraps: a police blotter, a paragraph, a name. Then I put every site on a map, and once I looked at the map I knew what I had to do.

I drove 25,000 miles to 38 states and photographed the place where each person was killed. I used the Mavica, so the pictures come back grainy and starved of information, which is the point. Almost none of the sites were marked. I started bringing flowers. When the disks filled up the camera would tell me it had insufficient memory, and I understood that we have insufficient memory about our own history.

The work also lives as an interactive archive and as a public Google Earth tour, so anyone can travel the country and read each story where it happened. It is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum and the Buffalo AKG Art Museum.